Re: A less-circumventable age verification protocol: good ol' files

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From: Thiago Macieira <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2026 16:26:51 -0700
Message-ID: <3192176.vuYhMxLoTh@tjmaciei-mobl5>
In-Reply-To: <2178991.atdPhlSkOF@daniel-desktop3>
References: <2178991.atdPhlSkOF@daniel-desktop3>
MIME-Version: 1.0

On Tuesday, 10 March 2026 19:41:27 Pacific Daylight Time Daniel Tang wrote:
> Both use D-BUS. I assert that the age verification must not use D-BUS.
> While the first circumvention might require root, a child could wrap it
> to not require root. They could just set the DBUS_SYSTEM_BUS_ADDRESS
> environment variable. Then a Python server could start listening on
> that file to falsely respond to requests.

Opening files isn't proof either, as one can LD_PRELOAD a stub library that 
intercepts opening of certain files and redirects to opening something else. 
And if the whole issue is to provide information to websites, one can patch 
the browser and recompile, to provide whatever information is desired.

To solve all of this, one needs a cryptographically-signed blurb to be 
provided to said websites, which they can then verify authenticity of. 
Moreover, it needs to be resistant to replay attacks, so in turn it must be an 
API that signs with a challenge provided by the website in the first place.

This gets technically difficult very quickly. I'd argue it's well past 
reasonableness.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
  Principal Engineer - Intel Data Center - Platform & Sys. Eng.

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